Modifier Groups: Streamlining Menu Management
I was the lead designer of Modifier Groups, a feature that reduced venue onboarding time by ~30% and saved our Customer Support team 100 hours monthly.
Overview
The Challenge
Venue operators and internal staff struggled with modifier management, experiencing frustration and wasting precious time. Originally, modifiers were tied to individual menu items, forcing duplication where the same modifiers needed to be applied to multiple products e.g. selecting a mixer when ordering a spirit or a choice of sauce for a main.
For some of our customers, this meant that making a required change to the menu could take literal hours when factoring in the repetition required across multiple venues and duplicate menu items. One of our biggest client even had a specialised hire to manage the workload full time.
The Solution
I redesigned the system architecture, decoupling modifiers from individual items and creating reusable "modifier groups." Now, a single group can be applied to multiple menu items through a one-to-many relationship, managed from a centralised location.
The Impact
Project Details
Year
2024 for me&u
Team
1 Product designer (me)
1 Product manager
1 Tech lead
5 Engineers
Tools
Figma
Dovetail
Google Forms
Linear
Notion
Key Research Insights
⛔ 5 out of 7 people failed to create a modifier in our usability testing baseline study (The ones who did weren’t confident they were successful)
🔎 ‘How to add a modifier’ 2nd most searched term in our help docs. ‘Modifier’ is the 7th most searched for term on help doc.
⏰ Takes menu makers 90 mins on average to add modifiers, upgrades and upsells. This is typically for CSV uploads only, but some POS syncs don’t pull modifiers through. Even when they do pull through, some don’t retain the correct order and need to be reordered.
🗣️ Mentioned 4 times across 28 survey responses on what areas slow down the onboarding process
🙏 We have received upwards from 20 feature requests to improve how modifiers are setup
Results & Business Impact
The Impact
This solution transformed a frustrating, error-prone process into an efficient, scalable system that empowers users while reducing operational burden.
I also believe this feature was a huge win for company morale. The Manage product was originally built with no design input and had been neglected for a long time. Staff had begged particularly for modifiers to be fixed as the work was mundane and constantly outsourced by the venues. Our squads ability to have this shipped communicated that the voices and time of our employees matters.
What I Learned
This was the squads first large feature after a company merger, so there was a lot of learning curves for engineers and myself becoming familiar with a new tech stack and culture.
Our ideal vision would fix many usability issues by changing the entire information architecture of the legacy system. This was not within our time-budget, so with firm prioritisation the designs had to compromise the ideal vision and also still support the previous work-flows. When dealing with legacy code-bases it is always an exciting challenge balancing where you want the system to evolve to and what is achievable to unlock the business and user goals.
Whilst we endeavoured to account for all of our personas, there was a single enterprise client who’s usage of modifiers was unique. As we had failed to account for this, our changes resulted in disrupted workflows that increased their workload. This resulted in some unplanned hot-fixes and creative solutioning on the legacy pages, and is planned to be revisited if we do decide to grandfather those pages as per the original vision.
✅ Estimated 30% reduction in venue onboarding time
✅ 100 hours/month saved in customer support
✅ Increased self-service adoption among venue managers
✅ Improved confidence of data accuracy amongst menu building team
✅ Increased speed and efficiency attributed to new centralised workflows
✅ New patterns defined in the design system with multi-page adoption in product